Upcoming Excitement coming to dCity - Presidential Roadmap

8 months ago

Recently there has been some chatter from my faithful followers about the price of SIM. Indeed, it is down about 5% from the stable 0.0003 Swap.Hive it has hovered at for most of my nearly year-long presidency, now seeming to stick around 0.000285.

And other than my update to the ARMERO mint price, I realize its been since late August that I did any post on dCity - and there have been many update with more to come!

So let's first take a closer look at the requests from the people, my people, you people who are beloved dCitizens.

With the classical Zimbabwe/Zambabwe coming into the picture, I got curious. Sure, we have all heard the stories of Zimbabwean hyperinflation in the 2000s, but surely they must have figured something out by now?

Yes it seems like they have, as 1 Zimbabwe dollar now seems like it can buy about 34 SIM at today's prices, not that great of spending power, but not in billions or trillions. Frankly its an order of magnitude stronger than the Colombian Peso and we seem to get along fine over here.

I searched google a bit and got an incorrect correction on my grammar for my efforts. Okay, well I guess monetary mismanagement really started in 1998, according to this article, where you can read more, because I am really getting off topic.

But conversion rates of things are really on topic. All that has to happen for SIM to go up in dollar terms, is for HIVE to go up in dollar terms more than SIM falls in HIVE price. I think we will see another price regime like this in the near future, but there is not much I can do about it - although I am working to onboard many people and projects to HIVE through my work with @hivecolombia - I think we can say that this might help long term but isn't likely to be a prime mover of the price.

Raising SIM in dollar terms then is somewhat outside my purview as president of dCity - it will happen when it happens. And we can do somethings to try to make sure we fall as little as possible against HIVE when it does come to pass.

Donuts and HIVE

We are left with only these two denominations then, and personally I am trying to cut back on donuts. I think there is some movement in the world at large to cut back on sugar and simple carbs, this generally lower demand for donuts might make the price of donuts in dollars go down - general deflation by technology might do the same. But these are out of my operating window, and so I think we can put this one into the same category as dollars - if we can get the price of SIM to stay steady or rise in HIVE price, we will ride HIVE price up in dollars, thus buying more donuts.

So let's get down to brass tax - is it even possible to hope that the SIM price might raise in HIVE terms? Or is the only thing we can wish for is that it falls as slow as possible?

Inflationary tokens - Deep sinks

So I think we can say with some certainty that the way to control the natural inflation of a game token is by having many uses for it, also called sinks. I actually think dCity has done pretty well at this - even though 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition are now closed, and we don't know when 4th edition will come out, we still have - SIM bags, paying student debts, experiments, unlocking techs, and SIM buybacks from HP delegation earnings.

There are also some incoming updates that will be quite interesting for the game, and I think will absorb some SIM:

Not only will the SIM BOX NFTs be purchaseable, but also will be dropped to SIM holders at a reported rate of 1 per 1 Million SIM Power. Could this encourage people to hold (or buy?) more SIM?

There is also the interesting claim mechanic - with two of the new combines and one of the older ones allowing players to purchase young citizens for SIM.

More and more SIM sinks in game are great, but I think the unlimited minting of something like a 4th edition will be good. We also still have Religion mechanics on the horizon, allowing players to donate SIM to their faith of choice in exchange for the leveling up of their churches. These promise to be large sinks in the future, not to mention continuing the race to buy Bags of SIM, which are getting added to more and more new combines.

Presidential Levers

For now, we are back to minimum printing, with the Sick Citizen Rebate back down to 1, and war tax at 0%. There has been some discussion on if I am being too harsh as president, that I should print some more SIM or allow taxes to drop even slightly below 100% after law firm.

I am not against it necessarily, perhaps for a short period, but I don't see any good reason to do so yet. Although as there is some discussion about starter cities, maybe there might be a better argument to try this for a promotional period when we are looking to add new players.

In the end, I think printing as little SIM as possible is probably the best thing I can do for the price - but I am interested in hearing your thoughts. This game has been ongoing for almost 6 years now - what a thing! And we are in the depths of a bear market, which may be starting to turn around, or may not be.

Don't forget that we will soon be losing population, as the popularity mechanism is set to get another downward adjustment, something which might see some of the largest cities one day waking up to be missing tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.

This could increase the desire to buy students and young citizens, valuing the citizen mechanic even more over time, and sending the price of population cards through the roof.

I promise to keep a steady hand through it all, keep posting as I can, and encouraging others to do so, and hopefully presiding over continued prosperity in our dCity Kingdoms.